AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You know, Francie, Dallie and I had a little baby boy once, but he died.” No emotion was visible in Holly Grace's face. She was merely stating a fact.
“I know. I'm sorry.” The words sounded stiff and inadequate.
“If you're having Dalli
e's baby and you don't let him know, you'd be pretty much of a low-life in my opinion.”
“I'm not having his baby,” Francesca said. “I had an affair in England, right before I came over. It's his baby, but he married a female mathematician before he knew I was pregnant.” It was the story she'd invented in the car, the best she could come up with on short notice, and the only one Dallie might accept when word of this got back to him. She managed to give Holly Grace one of her old haughty looks. “Good gracious, you don't think I would have Dallie's baby without demanding some sort of financial support from him, do you? I'm not stupid.”
She saw that she had struck a responsive chord and that Holly Grace was no longer so certain of herself. Francesca's iced tea arrived and she took a sip, then stirred it with her straw, trying to buy time. Should she give more details about Nicky td support her lie or should she keep quiet? Somehow she had to make her story stick.
“Dallie's funny about babies,” Holly Grace said. “He doesn't believe in abortion, no matter what the circumstances, which is exactly the sort of hypocrisy I hate in a man. Still, if he knew you were having his baby, he'd probably get a divorce and marry you.”
Francesca felt a stir of anger. “I'm not a charity case. I don't need to have Dallie marry me.” She forced herself to speak more calmly. “Besides, whatever you may think of me, I'm not the kind of woman who'd make one man responsible for another's child.”
Holly Grace played with the straw wrapper abandoned on the table. “Why didn't you get an abortion? I would have if I were you.”
Francesca was surprised at how easily she could slip back behind her rich-girl facade. She gave a bored shrug. “Who remembers to look at a calendar from one month to the next? By the time I realized what had happened, it was too late.”
They didn't say much else until Holly Grace's meal arrived on a platter the size of west Texas. “Are you sure you wouldn't like some of this? I'm supposed to lose four pounds before I go back to New York.”
If Francesca hadn't been so much on edge, she would have laughed as she watched food ooze over the sides of the plate and puddle onto the table. She tried to shift the course of the discussion by asking Holly Grace about her career.
Holly Grace dug into the exact center of her first enchilada. “Have you ever heard any of those talk shows where they interview famous models and all of them say that the job's glamorous, but it's a lot of hard work, too? As far as I can tell, every one of them is lying through her teeth, because I never made so much easy money in my life. In September, I'm even auditioning for a TV show.” She set down her fork so she could heap green chili salsa over everything except her Ferragamo sandals. Shrugging her hair away from her face, she picked up her taco, but she didn't lift it to her mouth. Instead, she studied Francesca. “It's too bad you're so short. I know about a dozen photographers who'd think they'd died and gone to homo heaven if you were six inches taller... and not pregnant, of course.”
Francesca didn't say anything, and Holly Grace fell silent, too. She set down her taco untasted and pierced the center of a mound of refried beans with her fork, twisting it back and forth until she'd made an indentation that looked like an angel's wing. “Dallie and I pretty much stay out of each other's love lives, but it doesn't seem to me I can do that in this case. I'm not absolutely sure you're telling the truth, but I can't exactly come up with a good reason why you'd lie.”
Francesca felt a surge of hope, but she kept her expression carefully blank. “I don't really care whether you believe me or not.”
Holly Grace continued to twist her fork back and forth in the beans, turning the angel's wing into a full circle. “He's sensitive on the subject of kids. If you're lying to me...”
Her stomach in a knot, Francesca took a calculated risk. “I suppose I'd be better off if I told you this was his baby. I could certainly use some cash.”
Holly Grace bristled like a lioness springing to the defense of her cub. “Don't get any ideas about trying to put the screws to him, because I swear to God I'll testify in court to everything you've told me today. Don't think for one minute that I'll sit on the sidelines and watch Dallie pass out dollar bills to help you raise another man's kid. Got it?”
Francesca hid her relief behind an aristocratic arch of her eyebrows and a bored sigh, as if this were all just too, too tedious for words. “God, you Americans are so full of melodrama.”
Holly Grace's eyes turned as hard as sapphires. “Don't try to screw him over on this, Francie. Dallie and I may have an unorthodox marriage, but that doesn't mean we wouldn't take a bullet for each other.”
Francesca pulled a six-shooter of her own from its holster and sighted down the barrel. “You're the one who forced this confrontation, Holly Grace. You can do whatever you want.” I take care of myself, she thought fiercely. And I take care of what's mine.
Holly Grace didn't exactly look at her with new respect, but she didn't say anything, either. When their meal was finally over, Francesca grabbed the check, even though she couldn't afford to. For the next few days, she anxiously watched the front door of the station, but when Dallie failed to show up, she concluded that Holly Grace had kept her mouth shut.
Sulphur City was a small, graceless town whose only claim to fame lay in its Fourth of July celebration, which was considered the best in the county, mainly because the Chamber of Commerce rented a tilt-a-whirl every year from Big Dan's Traveling Wild West Show and set it up in the middle of the rodeo arena. In addition to the tilt-a-whirl, tents and awnings encircled the perimeter of the arena and spilled out into the gravel parking lot beyond. Beneath a green and white striped awning, Tupperware ladies showed off pastel lettuce crispers, while in the next tent the County Lung Association exhibited laminated photographs of diseased organs. The pecan growers badgered the Pentecostals, who were handing out tracts with pictures of monkeys on the covers, and children dashed in and out of the tents, snatching up buttons and balloons only to abandon them next to the animal pens, where they set off firecrackers and bottle rockets.
Francesca moved awkwardly through the crowd toward the KDSC remote tent, her toes pointed slightly outward, her hand pressed to the small of her back, which had been aching since yesterday afternoon. Although it was barely ten o'clock in the morning, the mercury had already reached ninety-four and perspiration had formed between her breasts. She gazed longingly toward the Kiwanis Sno-Cone machine, but she had to be on the air in ten minutes to interview the winner of the Miss Sulphur City contest and she didn't have time to stop. A middle-aged rancher with grizzled cheeks and a fat nose slowed his steps and gave her a long, appreciative look. She ignored him. With a full-term pregnancy sticking out in front of her like the Hindenburg, she could hardly be anybody's idea of a sex object. The man was obviously some sort of loony who was turned on by pregnant women.
She had almost reached the KDSC tent when the sound of a single trumpet came toward her from the area near the calf pens where the members of the high school band were warming up. She turned her head to see a tall young boy with a hank of light brown hair falling over his eyes and a trumpet pressed to his mouth. As the boy played the notes of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” he turned his head so that the bell of the instrument caught the sun. Francesca's eyes began to tear from the glare, but she couldn't bring herself to look away.
The moment hung suspended in time as the Texas sun burned above her, white and merciless. The smell of hot popcorn and dust mingled with the scent of manure and Belgian waffles. Two Mexican women, chattering in Spanish, passed by with children draped from their plump bodies like ruffled shawls. The tilt-a-whirl clattered along its noisy track, and the Mexican women laughed, and a string of firecrackers went off next to her as Francesca realized that she belonged to it all.
She remained perfectly still while the smells and the sights absorbed her. Somehow, without knowing it, she had become part of this vast, vulgar melting pot of a country—this place of rejects and discards. The hot breeze caught her hair and
tossed it about her head so that it waved like a chestnut flag. At that moment, she felt more at home, more complete, more alive, than she ever had felt in England. Without quite knowing how it had happened, she had been absorbed by this hodgepodge of a country, transformed by it, until—somehow—she, too, had become another feisty, single-minded, ragtag American.
“You better get out of this sun, Francie, before you suffer heat stroke.”
Francesca whirled around to see Holly Grace ambling up next to her wearing designer jeans and eating a grape Popsiele. Her heart took a giant leap in the direction of her throat. She had not seen Holly Grace since their lunch together two weeks earlier, but she'd thought about her almost incessantly. “I assumed you'd be back in New York by now,” she said warily.
